Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Almost 80, He Continues the Ruckus

The Ken Jacobs film “Joys of Waiting for the Broadway Bus,” which had its debut this month at the Museum of Modern Art.Credit
Ken Jacobs/Creative Capital

There are artists who burn out at 30 and others who, accelerating as they mature, begin to seem like forces of nature. One such force is Ken Jacobs, who turns 80 next Saturday — an occasion marked by a recent tribute at the Museum of Modern Art, with another next weekend at Anthology Film Archives.

Mr. Jacobs, an aspiring painter who turned to film to make action art by other means, is a master of controlled yet ecstatic, visual cacophony. (His favorite composer is Charles Ives.) His four-part “Joys of Waiting for the Broadway Bus,” which had its premiere this month at the Modern, is a perceptual ruckus created from time-exposed, digitally enhanced 3-D slides. The nighttime street is transformed into a dynamic tapestry of light streaks and reflections that, floating in space, are at once transparent and eerily solid.

Reproaching the visual paucity of Hollywood 3-D while reworking the compositional notions of his erstwhile teacher, the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, “Joys” is as experimental and energetic as anything in Mr. Jacobs’s long career. “You see time in front of you — you see the weaving of time,” he exulted at the movie’s premiere.

It’s an understatement to say that, given his accomplishments, Mr. Jacobs is not nearly as well known as he should be — although having known him well for over 40 years, as a student and as a friend, I’m most comfortable referring to him as Ken. Born in Williamsburg when the neighborhood was a Yiddish-speaking Jewish slum rather than a hipster haven, Ken talks like a son of Brooklyn and looks like a cousin to the Marx Brothers. Indeed, he cast himself as Chico in “The Sky Socialist,” his phantasmagorical ode to the Brooklyn Bridge. A feature-length movie, “The Sky Socialist” was shot in eight millimeter in the mid-1960s, toward the end of Ken’s underground period (as opposed to his later, more formalist films) and, like much of his work, celebrates his hometown.

His first movie, “Orchard Street” (1956), was a straightforward observation of Lower East Side life; the films that followed, many starring the wildly uninhibited Jack Smith, used Manhattan streets, rooftops and dumps as the backdrop for sardonic minidramas of social despair. (The titles — “Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice,” “Little Stabs at Happiness” and “Baud’larian Capers: A Musical With Nazis and Jews” — tell all.) The greatest of these, “Star Spangled to Death,” is a an assemblage of almost seven hours that intercuts all manner of found footage with original material to create a vast underdog pageant of 20th-century American history. Begun in the late 1950s, it was finally finished (or abandoned) nearly half a century later, after Ken retired from his day job, teaching cinema at the State University at Binghamton.

Photo

Mr. Jacobs in the mid-90s with his homemade 3-D Nervous System device.Credit
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art.

It was there, as an undergraduate, that I met Ken and his wife, Flo (his films about her will be the subject of another Jacobs birthday tribute, June 2 at the Museum of the Moving Image); he had been hired in 1969 by the newly established Department of Cinema. Ken’s lectures were epic in length (years later he told me that, having never gone to college, he thought a professor was obliged to work an eight-hour day) and intensity. He was awe-inspiring or, to use one of his pet phrases, “mind-boggling.” I had never encountered a teacher who could talk so passionately about art, spontaneously integrating political views and childhood recollections. There were no notes. His method was what Jewish stand-up comics call a shpritz.

Ken’s project then was “Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son” — a feature-length movie created through the refilming and microanalysis of a 1905 one-reeler. As a teacher, he would regularly subject all manner of movies, from the works of D. W. Griffith to De Sica’s “Bicycle Thief,” to this sort of analysis. As his projectionist, I had the nerve-racking job of showing films backward, forward and frame by frame as Ken improvised a pedagogical voice-over.

It’s possible that Ken was the first moviemaker to use the projector seriously as his instrument. Perhaps as a result of teaching, his art grew more performative. Over the years he and Flo produced 3-D shadow plays and other sorts of projections using homemade mechanical contraptions of Ken’s design. (The old-school Lower Manhattan loft where the couple has lived since the mid-1960s may be considered one such contraption, a rare environment fondly immortalized by their son Azazel Jacobs in his 2008 movie “Momma’s Man.”) The most elaborate device was what Ken called the Nervous System, which created a shallow three-dimensionality in movies shot flat by running identical footage inch by inch, and slightly out of phase, through a pair of interlocked projectors fronted by a large, propellerlike shutter.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The Nervous System is on hiatus. Since retiring, Ken has been shooting on video and editing at the computer, producing piece after piece in what Andrew Lampert, a programmer and archivist at Anthology Film Archives, calls a “digital onslaught.” The best known of these recent pieces is “Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World,” a kind of digital equivalent of “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son” that takes its title and much of its imagery from a minute-long 1903 Edison actualité while drawing extensively on 19th-century stereopticon cards.

Everything is grist for the Ken Jacobs mill. Among the most impressive aspects of his teaching was the range of his interests. The last time I visited him he pressed a homemade DVD into my hand with the words “your students will love it.” (It was the 1938 version of “Pygmalion,” and that love remains to be seen.) Invited to show movies from the Modern’s collection, he selected Jean Vigo’s classic “Zero for Conduct” (1933), “Weegee’s Coney Island” (a near home movie made by that celebrated news photographer in 1954) and the 1932 shocker “Island of Lost Souls” — a movie I remember projecting during the chaotic Kent State spring of 1970.

That was a period in which Ken thrived. He’s been expecting the collapse of civilization or the end of the world for as long as I’ve known him. As a student, I once asked why anybody should even bother making art in the face of certain destruction. He shook my shoulders, stared into my face and said, “Because there has to be something there to be destroyed!” Mellower now but still feisty, productive and cheerfully apocalyptic, Professor Jacobs is making sure that there will be.

A version of this article appears in print on May 19, 2013, on Page AR16 of the New York edition with the headline: Almost 80, He Continues the Ruckus. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe